Faith of the Four Gods of Nature
The Faith of the Four Gods of Nature is an ancient, polytheistic faith centered around the belief in and worship of the forces of nature as personable gods. Adherents of the faith worship the Four Gods above all others: Bedenne the God-in-the-Breeze, Cayelenn the Goddess-Beyond-the-Shore, Cronenn the God-in-the-Stone, and the nameless god beneath-the-greenery of the River Roots. It is held that these four gods walk among humankind as avatars, principally held to be the Great Emperors of the Far West. It is the majority faith of the Far West, parts of the Sarpland, the Badlands, the First Isles, the Snout, and Escerd. In these different countries, there are different sets of beliefs on who the gods' avatars are (or were). The faith originates in part from the Pilantinemen, who held the Foerunner King to be the avatar of Bedenne. In their form of the faith, which remains the most heavily practiced form in the Badlands, the role of the River Roots is instead taken up by the River Finger. Thus the word Pilat (meaning "River") may be related to another name for the River Roots, Pod (Pol in Cubenner, where it instead refers to Cayelenn), and the name of [[Polenonne|''Polenonne]]. The worship of a major river may in turn date back to the Roots War, in which the winning belligerents worshiped the River Roots. This connection may have something to do with the River Roots' four major tributaries: the River Line, the River Zolmal, the River Volka, and the River Simsis, whereas the River Finger has only three major tributaries. As the faith formed in Pilat, it took on an essentially Ancient Egyptian aesthetic, with the gods often being pictured in similar ways. Bedenne is often drawn with a crow's head and a jade ''deshret; Cayelenn with a snake's head and a horned helmet; Cronenn with a wolf's head and iron raiments; and the nameless god with purple skin and golden raiments. In the mythology of the faith, Bedenne once ruled supreme over a place known as Third Earth (with this Earth essentially being the "Fourth Earth"), and the other gods were lesser beings not dissimilar to the nameless gods. He created the world perfectly, but ruled it alone, and the world fell to ruin when the gods Bredenn the God-in-the-Flames (depicted as red-skinned and horned), and Calthoss the God-of-the-Shadow (depicted as plain and dark with a cowl of stars) waged the apocalyptic skywar against him. During the war, Bedenne married Cayelenn. She became pregnant with triplets, and so he chose Cronenn as the third to rule the world alongside them. The Shine and the Shadow took her, and raped her, and born from this unholy union was a nameless god whom Bredenn took and dashed against the ground, doing so also for the triplets born. Together the children became the River Roots. In the end, the three gods and the nameless god of the river defeated the Shadow and the Shine and cast them into Bredenn's Sea, now known as Ferb's Sea. It is said that in the future the two evil gods will rise up once more to destroy the world, and start the four world cycle over again. The faith is the official state religion of the Far West, and the imperial cult is strongly enforced in public spaces. In the common conscious, however, belief in these gods has become greatly weakened, and the Faith o' Nine has wormed it itself into many people's hearts. Category:Organizations Category:Faith Category:Mythology Category:Culture Category:History Category:Faiths